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Living the dream Heat's Carter no longer an unknown
Posted: Monday May 22, 2000 10:52 PM
By Jim Huber, CNNSI.com MIAMI -- It has become known as "the shot." A last-second invention on May 12 that gave the Miami Heat a stunning 77-76 overtime victory in Game 3 of their series with the New York Knicks. It was a shot that just might have been for the "E" in a playground game of HORSE, compliments of a young man who might have done that on a few playgrounds in years past. But the trip from the asphalt to the gleaming hardcourt has been a grand adventure for Anthony Carter. "It was just a long journey for me, but as long as you are strong and you know what you want out of life, everything will be all right." In reality, that journey began for Carter when he was 15 years old on the outdoor courts of Atlanta's inner city, where he was rapidly becoming one of the youngest professional basketball players in history. Carter dropped out of high school in the ninth grade and went on to pursue a different kind of education. One that paid very big bucks. "I just played basketball basically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Carter. "I didn't want a 9-to-5 job, so I was out there hustling on the basketball court. And I stayed away from drugs and alcohol, and I think that's the biggest thing that kept me going." Did he play for money? You'd better believe it. "Yes, we always played for money. That was our job," he says. "We played for $1,000 or $2,000, however much guys wanted to play for. We would have somebody front the money, and they didn't even worry about the money. It was just up to us to play."
And along that way, one of Carter's opponents told his college coach about this kid who had dunked on him eight times during a midnight game. The coach, Bill Brummel at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif., came calling. "Me and coach started talking," Carter remembers, "and he told me to go back to school and get my GED if I want to come out and go to school. So I went to an adult-education center, got my GED. And then by the next three to four weeks, the next thing I knew, I was out in California at a junior college." Brummel says his new recruit brought with him an insatiable desire to succeed on the court. "He brought a tremendous intensity as far as wanting to win. Wherever he got that, it was certainly with him before he got here. Winning was everything to him, not the scholarship, like a lot of junior-college players, but winning." Two years later, after being twice voted MVP of his conference, Carter went farther west to the University of Hawaii, starring there. But a shoulder injury just before the NBA draft left him untaken. After a year in the CBA, the Heat signed him as a free agent. "Growing up in my neighborhood, you had to be tough," Carter said. "And playing for that type of money, you always had to give it all you got at all times. So that's what I brought to the NBA, just how to play hard all the time and never try to lose." The inspirations that drove Carter all those years came from several directions, including his aunt, Deborah Carter, who played in the WNBA with Washington and Utah. "He knew where he wanted to go," she said. "It was just that he had some crooks and turns, and he made one of them, which was dropping out of school. But he saw all these guys, his friends with the drugs, getting shot and getting hurt, and he knew he didn't want to go that way." Years earlier, in his fourth-grade class at Atlanta's Fred A. Toomer Elementary, Carter was one of 47 students selected for the "I have a Dream Foundation." He may have been young, but his dreams were bold and, as it turns out, perceptive. He wrote even then that he dreamed of playing professional basketball. "That was the best thing to ever happen to me," Carter now admits. "Because without their program, I don't think I'd be here now. I was out of school for three years, and they kept their promise and said if we want to go back to school they would still pay it, and they never stopped looking out for me. "Now I'm in the position that I'm at now. I went to another 'I Have a Dream' program right here in Miami and talked with three different classes, and I would tell the kids my whole life story and tell them not to follow in my footsteps and to always keep their dream alive." Who better to talk about dreams than a young man who is living one very large?
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